


Among the Lilies

by togina



Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Blind Character, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-18
Updated: 2015-04-18
Packaged: 2018-03-23 12:43:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,175
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3769024
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/togina/pseuds/togina
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sometimes he thought only the blind could see farther than the nose on their face.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Among the Lilies

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: Much like I am not Irish or from the 1930s or a myriad of other things, I'm also not blind. While I do have some friends who identify as such, they're all still sensitive to light and so the complete photo-blindness in this fic is entirely invented.
> 
> Originally supposed to be a [tumblr drabble](http://toli-a.tumblr.com/post/116702315628/steve-bucky-ones-blind-and-falls-in-love-with). Obviously that worked out well. Generally follows the plot of TFA and TWS, but there are some alterations, especially because I prefer my tumblr drabbles (all 11,000 words of it) with happy endings.
> 
> Title stolen from the Bible, a familiar phrase throughout Song of Songs.
> 
> PS: If you'd like a short drabble in this universe, scroll down to my response to katsai25's comment.

The first time Bucky met Steve, he wasn’t in a position to do much talking.  Bucky was on his way home from school, taking the usual route through the alley to avoid Mrs. Hamblin, and running into the usual gang of 7th grade thugs.  There were four of them this time: last time it had only been Charlie, who panted like a dog when you socked him in the stomach, and his hulking cousin Jack, who had been in 5th grade for three years and would still be there after Bucky had graduated and gone.

They must have learned that two dumb brutes weren’t enough to keep a Barnes on his knees.

Four certainly were, though – knocked Bucky clear off his knees and into the dirt, the rocks that rutted the unpaved alley digging into his arm, the dust clotting the blood dripping from his nose.  This was bad, Bucky realized, and not just because Becky would _murder_ him for ruining the shirt she’d spent so long sewing together, cutting it down from their father’s old work shirt and hemming the sleeves short, for summer.  Charlie had hated Bucky since he’d shown up to first grade, trailing behind his older sister and rubbing at his eyes where they were still swollen from crying that morning at home.  It had taken him five years to grind Bucky into the dirt, and he would certainly take his time.

“Hey!” a high-pitched, angry voice shouted from not that far away.  Bucky kept his chin to his chest, one arm protecting his face, the other one wrapped around his already sore stomach.  Jack might be dumb, but that didn’t make his punches any softer.  “You get away from him!  He ain’t done anything to you!”

“Oh yeah, Rogers?” Charlie taunted, slamming the toe of his boot into Bucky’s back, just above his belt.  _Steve Rogers_.  Of course.  As if Bucky hadn’t heard that shrill, righteous voice almost every day in the schoolyard, coming to some weeping, feeble child’s defense.  Except Bucky hadn’t wept since the first day of school, and he certainly wasn’t _feeble_.  “You gonna come here and _make_ me?”

“Sure I will,” the thin, furious voice shot back, and Bucky took advantage of Charlie’s laughter to catch him behind the knees, knocking the wind out of him in a satisfying gust of breath.  He clambered to his feet to take on Jack, and heard Steve Rogers hurling insults and fairly ineffective punches at the other two lugs behind him.

“Boys?”  Mrs. Hamblin had a voice like a crow, and a cane that she wielded like a nightstick.  “What are you doing back there?”

Charlie cursed – still breathless, Bucky noted with a coppery grin – and moved away.  “C’mon guys, let’s make tracks!  It ain’t worth having old Hamblin after us.  We’ll finish this later, Barnes.  Rogers.”  And four sets of heavy feet vamoosed in the opposite direction, leaving a cloud of dust and Steve Rogers wheezing near Bucky’s elbow.

“Stupid.  Punks,” Rogers whistled out, sounding like he was talking through his nose, the same way Becky did when she mimicked her teacher, Sister Bridget.  Only Becky never sounded like she was about to faint.  “They got no right.”

“Breathe, Rogers,” Bucky commanded, licking the blood off his teeth and getting dirt on his tongue, spitting the mess of sandy grit and iron out before reaching to the side to haul his unneeded rescuer out of the dry, dusty air of the alley.  “Charlie Weber sure ain’t worth you killing yourself for.”

“Wait!” Steve gasped, making Bucky stumble when his foot hit a rut.  “You forgot your . . . Well, your – um,” and Bucky could feel the awkward shrug, “you see what I mean.”

“No,” Bucky retorted drily, lifting his chin and standing as tall as an eleven-year-old boy could. “I don’t. Which would be why I carry that cane you’re too chicken to mention.”

“’m not chicken,” Steve muttered, wrenching away and trotting a few steps forward, presumably to pick up the long, thin cane that Charlie had threatened to snap into pieces. “I’m being polite.”

“I didn’t know stuttering was polite,” Bucky said, and marched to end of the alley without waiting for Rogers just to prove that he _could_. Bucky didn’t need to be rescued; not by Rogers, not by anybody. “Hurry up,” he added, when Rogers’ short stride didn’t immediately follow.  “It’s sunny out here.  Maybe you’ll stop shivering.”

“How do you know it’s sunny?” came that warbling, righteous voice, calmer now than Bucky had ever heard it, brimming with curiosity.  “Um.  Crap.  I mean –“

“I can feel it,” Bucky interrupted, to put Steve out of his misery.  “Can’t you feel it, when it gets dark outside?”  He took the cane back, because it was best to keep Mrs. Hamblin as far away as possible, and he would need it to thwack little Morty Levy when the brat tried to pickpocket him again.

“I don’t know,” Rogers answered, sounding hesitant, the words tumbled like stones in his mouth before he let them go.  “I guess I can.  At least, I don’t have goosebumps anymore.”  He had smiled into the last sentence: it made his voice go light instead of shrill, like the breeze through the trees in Prospect Park when Becky took him on Sundays.

“Goosebumps?” he asked, thinking of the goose Mr. Hardy had kept behind their building, that had bit him when he tried to decipher what it was.

He could feel Steve tilt his head one way and then the other, the air changing as he did.  “Goosebumps – you know, how your skin gets all bumpy when you’re cold? That’s what my Ma calls them, anyway. Here, see,” and he grabbed Bucky’s free hand without so much as a by-your-leave, pressing it to the skin below his collar.  It was cool, and shivered under Bucky’s fingers when he drew them across, feeling the whisper of fading rises and valleys and the smooth quiet of Steve’s skin.

Bucky couldn’t remember touching anyone but Becky.  Bucky didn’t think anyone would allow it, if he asked.

“I’m Steve, by the way,” the other boy said, when perhaps he felt that they had been quiet too long, Bucky’s head cocked to the side as he examined Steve’s shoulder with his fingertips.  “Steve Rogers.  We go to school together, only you probably wouldn’t know it because I’m never there.”

“Bucky,” he offered in return, reluctantly pulling his hand away and holding it out to shake.  “Bucky –“

“Barnes, I know,” Steve interjected, words like a sudden rainstorm in spring.  He shook Bucky’s hand so hard that Bucky thought he might feel his bones creak.  “I’ve seen you around.  I, uh, I’m surprised Charlie’s gang hasn’t gotten to you before now. They normally go after the . . .”

Bucky chuckled, cold and raspy as the stone he used to sharpen their kitchen knife.  “The weaklings?” he bit out, each word clear.  “The sissies?  Or did you mean to say that they normally go after the _cripples_?”  Someone walking past them – a woman, her skirt slipping quietly against her stockings with each little step – gave a little gasp at the word, and hurried on.

Becky’s eyebrows lifted when she was surprised, when Bucky managed to put away all the dishes without cracking any of them, or when he’d insisted on going to school even if she couldn’t be there to read the board aloud.  He found his expression mimicking hers when Steve straightened, puffing out his chest so that it nearly knocked into Bucky’s own.  “You’re _not_ a cripple,” he snapped, words crisp as autumn leaves caught in the first, chill gusts of winter.  “No more than I am, at any rate.”

Bucky smiled, and felt the summer air on his teeth, the dry spell they’d been having on his tongue.  “What,” he asked, brushing a hand out uninvited to feel the sharp edges of Steve Rogers’ anger, the ridges of his frown.  “Did you lose a leg in the war?”

Steve’s left eyebrow lifted higher than his right, when he was surprised. And his cheeks went round as apples when he laughed.

* * *

“ _No_ , Steven Lord-Grant-me-patience Rogers, you cannot repeat tenth grade just because Sister Agatha doesn’t like to read everything she writes out loud.”  Mrs. Rogers had a voice like her hands: graceful, slender fingers curled around Bucky’s hands as she showed him their apartment, but strong as steel cables under her skin.

“But –”

“No.”  There was a moment, Bucky knew, where the two obstinate Rogerses paused to scowl at one another, almost identical in the downward sweep of their anger, the thin lines of their lips.  Steve’s face had filled out some, by seventeen, and his eyebrows were thicker than his Ma’s, but he pursed his lips the same way he had when they had met five years before.  “And that’s final, lad.”

“She’s going to fail him!” Steve protested, voice still light despite cracking and deepening when he was fourteen, a year of sounding like their old tenement windows when winter blew through the cracks.  “Ma, it’s not fair!”

Sarah Rogers tried not to chuckle, the gentle huff of air from her mouth mirroring the fine, radiant lines at the corners of her eyes.  “No, my dear, dreaming boyo. It’s not fair at all.”  And she ruffled Bucky’s hair, thin fingers pressed firmly into his scalp.  She wouldn’t say that it wasn’t fair that Grant Rogers had gone to war when his bride was two months pregnant, and had yet to make any friends at all in a foreign land.  It wasn’t fair that he never came back, but that George Barnes did; came back and stayed long enough to meet his elegant, curly-haired daughter and father a blind son, before the latter drove him into the bottle and away from the family he refused to call his own.  It wasn’t fair that Sister Agatha thought boys like James Buchanan Barnes were a blight on American society, that they should be neutered or put away so only the _real_ men would remain.  _I know, lad_ , Mrs. Rogers said, but said it soft with fingers carding through overlong hair, and Steve didn’t hear.

“C’mon, Steve,” Bucky mediated, reaching out to catch his friend’s shirtsleeve, or the strap of his suspenders.  Steve never stood farther away than Bucky could see him, with sensitive fingertips and questing hands.  “You can read me Shakespeare, and I’ll teach you algebra.  Becky’s too busy packing to bother with plays, she says.”

Steve stilled, and his shoulders slumped when Bucky reminded him of the move. Indiana. Becky had to marry a soldier, and up and move to _Indiana_.  Bucky knew exactly how many steps it took him to go a mile, and even the thought of multiplying that by 800 – the distance from Brooklyn to the base in Indiana, his new brother-in-law said, speaking loudly and too slow, as though Bucky were deaf and dumber than a rock to boot – made him tired.  It wasn’t like he had much choice, though.  No one thought a defective, fifteen-year-old boy could last a day on his own.

“Go on,” Mrs. Rogers urged, her lilt softer than Steve’s swaddling blanket, fleecy and worn.  She was unbothered by Steve’s distress at Bucky’s leaving, and Bucky’s distress at the imminent loss of all he knew, the stairs that creaked when the wind blew from the west, the alleys where clothes snapped and dried on the line.  Steve, whose voice called Bucky down for the walk to school in the mornings, chattered on like the noise of the trolleys through the afternoons, familiar and comforting in its regularity.  “You boys might as well make space for Jamie’s clothes, while you’re in there.  And decide which of you claims what end of the bed.”

“What –” Steve’s voice still broke, sometimes, when he was upset and wouldn’t say so out loud.  When he picked fights about Sister Agatha because he didn’t want to fight about Bucky going away.  “Do you . . . Ma!” he finally exclaimed, bursting with sound and warmth and barreling into Bucky with a solidity that meant ‘joy’.  Sister Agatha thought that Bucky couldn’t understand English, without his sight.  Sister Agatha was too blind to see the emotions scrawled over Steve’s face, the sunshine and honey in his voice.

“You’re staying!” he cried, directly in Bucky’s left ear, his breath moist against the cheek Bucky was going to need to learn to shave.  “Oh, we should go get your things! Let’s go now. We can go now!”

“Peace, lad,” Mrs. Rogers scolded, but laughter threaded bright and liquid through her words.  “It’s pouring buckets now, and Rebecca said she and her new man would bring his things by tomorrow, just after breakfast.  And you haven’t even asked the boy if he wants to stay.  Might be he’s itching to go west, where it’s quieter without all your jabbering.”

Steve wrinkled his nose at the thought, and Bucky grinned.  “If you put your smelly feet in my face when I’m sleeping, Rogers, you’ll be bunking on the floor.”

“It’s my room,” Steve protested, so accustomed to Bucky’s hand resting on his face that he sometimes forgot it was there, accidentally catching the end of Bucky’s thumb in his mouth.  Bucky tugged at Steve’s lower lip before moving his hand, and the blush rushed like blistering sun to Steve’s cheeks, warming Bucky’s palm and some place deeper in his chest.  “And besides,” Rogers added, dragging Bucky back to the room, careful to avoid the uneven floorboard that sent Bucky sprawling if he wasn’t warned, “my feet don’t smell!”

* * *

It was difficult, walking so quickly without his cane, especially over muddy mounds of dirt and down brief inclines where the grass was slippery from the unceasing rain.  It was devastating, to walk with Mrs. Rogers’ weight too heavy on his shoulder, her voice echoing in its absence, the sound of the world with the window slammed shut.

“It’s the blind boy,” someone whispered, sharp stones they thought dulled by the handkerchief over their mouth.  “You see, the one in the middle, just behind her poor son.  Sarah took him in, you know, treated him like he was her own.”  _Treated him like he was_ normal _,_ she bellowed into the terrible, silent vacuum that Sarah Rogers had left behind, unaware that Bucky could hear her shock that Mrs. Rogers had housed him at all, her censure that a poor Irish woman had dared to treat a _blind boy_ like he might grow up to be a man.

“Shut up!” screeched a voice less than an arm’s length from Bucky’s chest, spinning away and leaving his mother weighing heavier on Bucky, her death biting into his shoulder, smelling of damp wood and mothballs (his suit had been Grant Rogers’, decades ago), the cemetery dripping with a cloying sympathy that reeked of perfume and aftershave, the iron burning just-washed clothes.  “Shut up!  You don’t get to say anything about my mother, Mrs. Harrigan!  And you don’t get to say anything about Bucky, either.  They’re both better than you’ll ever be!”

Steve was already panting, the thin fabric of Mrs. Rogers’ nylons snagged on a hangnail, his voice a moment away from an irreparable tear.  “Steve,” Bucky murmured, wanting to gather his friend back to him, but he couldn’t step away and leave the coffin to tumble to the ground.  He couldn’t escape Mrs. Rogers’ death, harsher than the grain of the unpolished wood and colder than the rain.  “Steve, come here.  I don’t know where to go.”

He stretched out his left hand, feeling at the right height for Steve’s shoulders and grasping at nothing but raindrops, embarrassment lodged in his throat.  He certainly looked like the blind boy now, flinging his arm out and never –

Steve’s hand caught his, fingers chilled under the warmth from Bucky’s palm.  Steve would have goosebumps, Bucky knew, and the more time they spent in the rain the longer his inevitable flu would last.  “Does it matter where we go,” Steve whispered, a coal fire crackling to embers because they’d run out of money for fuel.  “Does it matter, if she’ll still be dead?”  But he moved back into his place as pallbearer, ignored Mrs. Harrigan’s huffed “Well I never!” and led the way to the gaping wound in the ground where Mrs. Rogers’ lilting hands and chortling cheeks and clever, squinted eyes were to be put away.

Before, Bucky had thought that grief was the slam of a door and the sound of familiar footsteps retreating for the last time, a little boy crying at the unexpected loss.  But grief was the churning scent of fresh soil and torn grass, mothballs and wet wool, the feeling of vertigo and darkness rising from a gouge in the earth, the cool removal of someone’s handshake when they pretended to understand the unimaginable absence of Sarah Rogers in the world.  Grief felt like the hollow, empty bowl of Bucky’s chest.  It tasted like the hot, salt-drenched rush of Steve’s tears, appearing too quickly for Bucky’s fingertips to brush away as they stood next to the place which proved Sarah Rogers was gone and Bucky felt the evening creep from the ground like fog, the twilight as silencing as a shroud.

* * *

“I have a job, Buck.  You don’t need a job.”  Steve’s voice had been wrong for months, since, and not just because it echoed in places Mrs. Rogers had filled.  His voice was the resigned tread of men’s shoes every morning as they headed to another dreary day of work in an endless cycle, the crack of a branch that couldn’t bear the weight of the snow.

Bucky needed a job.  He needed to get out of their apartment, because Mrs. Rogers’ absence was suffocating him, the pounding silence of it a match for the migraine that built up when he forced back the tears.  He needed to help pay the rent, or they weren’t going to have an apartment by the first of next month.  He needed to find a way to make Steve smile again, and that wasn’t going to happen if he was trapped on the fifth floor of a tenement building where everything they touched was immersed in despair.

“Hold still, I’m not done looking at this,” Steve snapped, brittle where he had once brimmed with his Ma’s fluid laugh.

“It’s a burn, Steve,” Bucky snorted, jerking his hand away, wincing when Steve’s fingernail dragged over the tender spot from when he’d tried to bake bread that afternoon and miscalculated where the handle for the oven door would be.  It would heal – puffy and painful, throbbing for a while, then settling into a scar, the way the dirt had settled onto Mrs. Rogers’ grave.

“I told you not to use the stove when I’m gone!”  Steve’s voice went high and thin like they were boys again, stretched tauter than a laundry line about to snap.  “I knew you would get hurt.”  The wash of scratchy-wool smugness in Steve’s voice rubbed at Bucky’s composure, but it was only a blanket tossed over the sharp, shattered-glass shards of fear that Steve didn’t want Bucky to see.

“So if we never have anything to eat, I don’t get hurt?” Bucky challenged, wanting to fold his arms but wanting more to see Steve’s face as he spoke.  “Is that the same reason you won’t let me do the shopping?  Or cross the street without a chaperone, like Millie O’Hare’s Da following her on all her dates?”  Steve didn’t frown, but his face hardened to stone, a sure sign that he didn’t want to admit what Bucky said was true, though he couldn’t bring himself to lie, either.  “Tell me, Stevie,” he finished, trying to keep his own voice gentler than the splash of waves along the shore.  “Do you not want me looking for work because you think no one will hire the blind man?”

“Bucky!” Steve hissed, already bristling.  No one was allowed to insult James Barnes – not even James Barnes himself.  “That’s the stupidest, most –”

“Or is it because you’re afraid I’m too crippled to work without dying?”

Their apartment was never truly silent.  There was the shrieking of the McGillan twins across the hall, and Mr. Friedman shouting at his radio in Yiddish just downstairs.  There was the rustle of laundry drying in the alley, and the trolley going by a block away, squealing its way down the tracks.  There were the women chattering in one apartment or another, while their men sat on the stoop and smoked and talked about Poland and the war.  There was Mrs. Rogers, deafening Bucky with how much it ached, that he could hold his breath and strain his ears, but the delicate, china clink of her laughter would never come.

Steve’s face was silent, though, still as a granite lion under Bucky’s palm.  A MacGillan brat began to wail, and the trolley came screeching around the corner, buffeting the unnatural quiet in Steve’s expressive face.

Then it cracked, with the wrenching noise of a building smashed to the ground.  Steve’s face pulled in toward his nose, eyes clamped shut and gasping wetly through his mouth, sucking air around Bucky’s palm.  “I can’t lose you,” he breathed, plaster crumbling into dust.  “I can’t lose you, too, Bucky.  I _can’t_.”  The silence coalesced into keening, louder and more terrified than both MacGillans could manage at once.

“Shh,” Bucky soothed, humming comfort with the arms he wrapped around Steve’s shaking shoulders, the fingertips he slid through brilliantined hair.  “Punk.  Shh.”

And that was when Bucky learned that falling in love smelled like hair cream and paintbrush cleaner and fear, felt like oily hair under his fingernails and panting, exhausted breaths against his neck, his arms too tight around a heaving chest.  He couldn’t lose Steve, either, which seemed like one of those things Bucky had known since the very first, and yet had just discovered with the electric clap of a lightning bolt, the thunder beating loud under his ribs.  “Shh, Stevie.  You ain’t gonna lose me, punk.  Where would I go?”

* * *

Bucky was excellent with numbers, which turned out to surprise everyone except Steve, who hadn’t done his own math homework since sixth grade.  In fact, Bucky was so talented with numbers that Steve had to quit his job cleaning up at the art school to follow Bucky around their neighborhood and read off the ledgers so that Bucky could do the books.  In a few months, they had work six days a week, from Mr. Goldman’s deli to Mrs. Harrigan’s hat shop all the way over in Queens.  They charged her twice their going rate, and Steve’s face expressed none of his usual regret.

Which might have been because Steve had fallen in love with the war, and was too busy swooning over it to bother with Mrs. Harrigan either way.

Their apartment reeked of the war.   _Brooklyn_ reeked of the war.  Boys hawked papers by the trolley stop, girlish, merry voices shouting “1500 Dead in Hawaii!,” “Heavy Gunfire on the Western Front!”  It seemed like everyone and his brother was joining the military, stomping down the streets in their Army-issued boots until Bucky’s head rang with the sound.  They couldn’t make it through a radio broadcast without an interruption from the station, letting them know that Churchill had given a speech, or lit a fresh cigar. The apartment was saturated with sweat: Steve’s, from trying to jog five miles in the snow every morning, and wheeze through ten push-ups when Bucky wanted to sleep.  Steve’s sweat, when running through the snow gave him pneumonia, and they couldn’t work for two weeks because Steve was too sick to move and Bucky didn’t have the patience to listen to anyone else read him their accounts.

Steve tore recruitment posters down from windows and brought them home.  They were piled on their table, stacks of waxy paper and ink crinkling under Steve’s eager fingers and drifting like snow onto their floor.

Bucky went with Steve to the induction center, the first time.  He took his cane, because it was winter and he had no desire to crack his head open on a patch of ice when Steve was going to need him on the walk home.  Because they would be walking home.  He might not see what everyone else did, but he could hear Steve’s asthma when it started whistling through his closing throat.  He could feel the curves and dips in Steve’s spine when he was pounding his back to force the mucus out of his damn lungs.  Bucky could see as well as anyone that the Army wouldn’t take Steve.

They were jeered at, walking up to the door.  “Hey look, Mack – Uncle Sam must be pretty desperate, if he’s taking _that_!”

“You’re going the wrong way, kid.  The sanitarium ain’t here.”  Something jostled Steve’s shoulder, and Bucky swung his cane sharply to the right, colliding with someone’s kneecap and eliciting a grunted curse.  “Freak!  Both of you.  A circus sideshow, that’s where runts and cripples like you belong!”

Bucky’s cane brought them swiftly to the front of the line, and the nurse sent them just as swiftly back into the January air, not even attempting to muffle her laughter into her ink-scented hands.

Steve didn’t invite him, the next time.  Or the time after that.  Maybe he thought his chances would be better without a cripple at his side.

“She said I’m too short,” he announced, waving his fourth rejection letter in a familiar burst of fury.  At least the constant, battering racket of the war had distracted Steve from the vacuum Mrs. Rogers had left in their home, sucking Bucky over and over again into the jagged chasms of his grief.  “But there’s nowhere that says I have to be a giant, I told her.  Gerry Leckenberg is as short as I am, and he got drafted last week.  Then she says it’s the asthma.  Or maybe the little problem with my right ear.”

“The little problem where it’s quiet on that side?” Bucky supplied, mouth twisting and eyebrows raised.  Steve huffed and elbowed him lightly in the ribs, and Bucky reached out to see Steve’s smile, running his fingertips over quirked lips and pretending to wince when Steve retaliated by biting down on his thumb.

“Plenty to do here at home,” he said softly, and his hopelessness sounded like the weak sunlight before the winter snow.  He stood less than a foot from Steve’s good ear, but Steve would never hear anyone ask him to stay.

So Bucky tried to distract him with the noise and gunpowder scent of fireworks, and Steve abandoned Bucky in the jostling chatter and sugary smells of the boardwalk and found Dr. Erskine.  And Dr. Erskine – his voice thick with guilt, stirred through like flour in a stew, his hand unsteady with a tremor when he offered it to Bucky – asked Steve to leave, and go to Lehigh.

Then made a gurgling noise of surprise when Bucky demanded his own application.  Lehigh might not be 800 miles away (8,448,000 steps), but Bucky didn’t expect it would be any easier to get there from Brooklyn.

Steve protested Bucky’s coming all the way to Jersey, words sharp as a woodpecker hammering against a lamppost, but Bucky could hear the laughter chiming below, the pride that rung through all the words Steve didn’t say.

* * *

Steve started boot camp, and Bucky tagged along most days because there wasn’t much else to do in sunbaked Nowhere, New Jersey.  Some days he spent with the Doctor, though, because Steve had enough on his plate without tossing his blind friend into the mix.

“Why don’t you sign up?” a familiar, firecracker voice inquired, on one of the days that Bucky had settled on his back in the prickly grass and planned to doze in the sun.

“Sign up for what?” he replied, holding his hand out for the paper and tobacco scent of a cigarette when he heard the flick of the other man’s lighter.  “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, Mr. Stark, but Uncle Sam ain’t taking the blind.”

“But he’s taking the deaf asthmatics?” Howard Stark riposted in a cloud of smoke, sardonicism condensing in its haze.  “I know Erskine told you about the project.  If we can fix your scrawny friend out there, what makes you think we can’t fix you, too?”

Bucky ignored him, focusing instead on the acrid taste of tobacco in his mouth, the smoke curling off his tongue into the still, sweltering air around them.  Stark’s shock when Bucky didn’t leap to his feet and demand to see Erskine made the cigarette even sweeter.

“Stark,” he finally said, rolling the word over in his mouth and letting it out slow.  “You can see, can’t you?”

“Eyes like an eagle,” Howard assured him, patting his own chest.  “I can see better than any sharpshooter on this base.”

“And do you know,” Bucky told him, smiling into the fog of smoke above his head as he moved leisurely to his feet.  “If they stuck you in that magic machine the Doc has – that machine you two designed to spit out the perfect man – you’d come out blind as a mole.”  He paused, exhaled into Stark’s confusion.  “You can’t fix me, Stark, because I’m not broken.”

He walked backwards, for a few steps.  Just long enough to prove that he could.  Just long enough to flip the penny out of his pocket and into Stark’s gaping mouth, where it clinked satisfyingly against the other man’s teeth.

“Better than any sharpshooter on this base,” Bucky echoed, grinning as he walked away.

* * *

Of course, Stark seemed to take that as a personal challenge.  He followed Bucky around for days, demanding the answers to endless lists of questions about how Bucky could tell where someone was, how far away he could do that, and if he could tell people from animals, and so on.

“How would I know?” Bucky snapped, aggravated.  “We didn’t exactly have deer and antelope in Brooklyn!”

Then Stark insisted on target practice, which didn’t make any sense, because the targets were made of wood.  They didn’t inhale, or rustle in the breeze, or crush leaves under their feet.  “I.  Can’t.  See.  Them,” Bucky informed the purported genius, speaking to Stark like his brother-in-law had once spoken to him.

“They don’t make any noise,” Steve intervened, and Bucky tugged his friend’s hand up to his chest in a quiet thanks.  “Buck knows where you are because you’re loud.”

“I am not!” Howard protested, the fabric of his shirt shifting as he crossed his arms.

The smile slipped into Steve’s voice like a rising tide.  “We all are, to Bucky,” he insisted, letting Bucky look at the new calluses on the palms of his small hands.  “He could shoot at _you_ , but you can’t ask him to aim at something that won’t do so much as peep.”

If Steve thought that he had gotten Bucky off the hook, he didn’t know Howard Stark very well.  He showed back up four hours later, just as Steve was heading out the door and back to his rack before lights out at ten.

“Barnes!  I brought you someone to shoot at!”  Someone – probably one of Howard’s unlucky assistants – was breathing heavily in Bucky’s doorway.  Out of breath.  Wearing a heavy helmet, and a U.S. Army rucksack.

“I was joking!” Steve cried, light tone distilled into genuine concern.  “You can’t seriously want him to shoot anyone.”

“Of course I do,” Stark rebutted, striding into the room and clapping Bucky hard on the shoulder.  “Oh, don’t get your panties in a twist, Rogers, nobody’s dying.  I reengineered the bullets, took me all afternoon.  These are the right weight for his sidearm, but they’re just damp chalk.  That way we can tell if he hits Lowell over there, and work on his aim.  Once he’s got this, we can see how he is with a rifle.”  Howard with a new idea was like Mr. Friedman’s terrier when it smelled a cat: vibrating with the potential of it all, yapping until he’d worn himself clear out.

“It’s the middle of the night!” Steve objected, just as a loud series of metallic clicks proved the barrack lights had just been doused for the night.

“Why would that matter?” Stark inquired, already folding Bucky’s fingers around the cold angles of the gun.  “Barnes’s ears still work after dark, don’t they?  Come on, we’ll go to the range!”

And they stayed there until dawn stumbled over the horizon, yawning through the mist that had settled around them sometime in the night.  The gun was unwieldy, and Bucky had missed for hours, unable to connect the clench of his finger to Lowell’s whimpering a dozen yards away.

“It’s math,” Steve finally grumbled, belly down on the wet grass and half asleep.  “’s all numbers, Buck.  That’s what the snipers say, anyhow.  You like math.”

Bucky hummed, turning that idea over slowly in his exhausted brain, examining it the way he had memorized every curve and angle of the gun.  And then he brought Lowell down with his next shot – which went lower than Bucky had planned, but that _was_ the quickest way to leave a man crying on the ground.

After that, Steve went back to boot camp while Bucky found himself enrolled in endless target practice.  Howard must have run out of other experiments to pass the time.  He dressed his assistants in U.S. uniforms, in French suits, suited them up like Dagos and Krauts and Japs when he discovered that Bucky could hear the difference in their gear.  Bucky learned how to handle a pistol, how to break down a rifle, how to calculate the perfect shot and then wait for it, letting the air slide out of his lungs so he could hear every breath the world took.  The best sharpshooter on base, Howard boasted, then proved it by sending Bucky to hunt deer with the Colonel.

Bucky pointed out that snipers didn’t have to _carry_ their kills back to base and _make sausage_ out of them, and Steve laughed so hard he choked on his venison steak.

Then, somehow, Stark must have bragged to the wrong man, because Bucky found himself drafted into the clattering war while Steve was still proving himself at Lehigh.  “I’m blind!” Bucky hissed, his anger looming over Stark’s slick face, all of him oiled too smooth.  “You can’t do this,” he added, his voice blending with the rumble of a troop ship’s engine where it waited like a barmaid for last call.

“Uncle Sam needs you,” Howard replied, unmoved.  “But don’t worry – I made you a new rifle, and a cane.”

* * *

Stark, for all that he was a pickpocket with a con man’s grin, made good guns.  The rifle sang ballads to the pads of Bucky’s fingers, fired with the joyful report of Steve’s voice in Bucky’s dreams.  The cane was metal, less than a foot long and easily tucked into Bucky’s coat until he wanted it, when it could telescope out to six times that and stay strong enough to catch Col. Phillips hard in the shins.

Bucky used the cane around base, because it was easier, and it made the other men leave him alone, muttering under their breath about _defective, 4F Charlies_ because they must have thought he was deaf as well.

Unfortunately, Phillips had been at Lehigh.  Phillips had seen Bucky shoot.  And the more missions he went on, the more crowded the space around him became, hands and voices and the rank scent of too many young men and not enough showers all clamoring for attention.  “Hey Sarge, you ain’t really blind, are ya?”

“Sarge, you goin’ on patrol with us tonight?  I bet Manny his cigarette rations you can take down a Wop right between their beady eyes.”

“What are ya eating for dinner, Barnes?  How do ya know it’s carrots, if ya can’t see ‘em?”

High voices and low voices, musical voices – Davis had sung in a club, before he got drafted – and gritty, sand in your eye voices.  But none of them had Steve’s voice, and so Bucky stayed quiet and did his job.

Being a sniper was simple.  It was waiting, and watching for the slightest sound, and doing the numbers to make the hit.  Catching up to his unit was _not_ so simple, since dirt rutted with detonated mines and surrounded by trees didn’t make much noise.  Bucky could guarantee that he’d either slam into a tree or trip over a stump at least twice before reaching his men.

It took him three trees and a sprawl into the mud before he caught up to his unit on their last mission.  It took him one, draining exhale to hear the buzz of something electric that raised the hairs on the back of his neck.  That was how it felt in a storm, just before lightning struck.  Powerful.  Dangerous.  Bucky dropped the rifle, and told the men to hold up their hands.

* * *

Zola didn’t realize that Bucky was blind.  At first, Bucky assumed that the scientist had known and just didn’t care, because all of his experiments died in the end.  But no.  Zola talked, as he considered the veins he sliced out of Bucky’s arms, the injections that left Bucky mute from the screaming.  Blind and dumb, and still unable to shut out Zola’s voice.

“Ah, ve don’t vant this one, you see, hmm Sargent?  Zu red, it is.  Like your weak blood.  Ve need something bluer.  Something vith power.”

Steve had tried to teach Bucky colors one year, in love with art and unable to explain it to his best friend.  Mrs. Rogers had sat at the kitchen table, hemming the tears in Steve’s shirt from another fight and laughing at them both.

“This is brown,” Steve started, pinching Bucky’s fingers around the dusty fabric of his trousers.  Brown meant rough, then, coarse and sweltering when it got too hot.  But when Bucky said that, Mrs. Rogers snorted and Steve groaned.  “No, Bucky, that’s not how colors work.  Your hair is brown, too.”

Bucky frowned.  “But they’re not the same at all,” he disagreed, rubbing his fingers along the fine hair at his temple.  “Why would they both be brown?  Hair _and_ trousers are brown?”

“No,” Steve sighed, and his lips tightened the same way they did just before he opened his mouth and joined a fight.  “Your hair is brown.  My hair is yellow, the same color as corn, or the sun.  Ma’s hair is red, like a tomato.  My eyes are blue, like the sweater Ma knitted for you last winter.  The ocean is blue, too, but darker.”

“Darker like night?” Bucky verified, because he knew the world felt different after the sun vanished over the horizon, even if he couldn’t see it go.  And of course the ocean was night-blue, settling over you like a chill, endless and terrifying when your toes left the firm grit of the sand.  Steve’s eyes would be blue like the sweater, then, soft and warm when they wrapped around you.  “They feel the same,” he agreed, because these colors, at least, made sense.

“You can’t feel colors!” Steve argued, but he let Bucky wander the apartment and guess the colors for everything, giggling when he invariably got them wrong.  Steve’s giggle was yellow, too, or sweater-blue – warm and bright as the sun.

You could feel colors, though.  Red was tomatoes, and blood pouring from Bucky’s body wherever Zola chose to peel back his skin, dripping onto the metal table like tomato juice pulped by Mrs. Rogers’ knife into the crevices of their table.  And blue was the ocean, pain so vast that your toes couldn’t find the ground, so endless that waves of it buffeted through you even after you reached dry land.

Steve’s voice (his real voice, not the voice that Bucky dreamed up when he drifted away on currents of pain, eyes closed and hot tears spilling like blood from under his lids) was still yellow, warm and unbelievable as the sun in a concrete room that smelled of death.  “Bucky.  Oh god, Bucky, I thought you were dead.”

Bucky was so dizzy that he didn’t notice until he’d been set on his feet that those weren’t Steve’s hands, and the heart pounding under his palm didn’t flutter like Steve’s always had.  “I thought you were smaller,” he answered, and Steve might be taller, but his smile looked just the same when Bucky pressed a finger to chapped lips.

Bucky could walk across girders without a hitch, and yet he tripped over every single godforsaken mound of dirt on the way back to base.  He never hit the ground, though.

“Is he drunk?” someone asked, after Steve had manhandled him back onto his feet for the fifth time, grumbling when Bucky wouldn’t let Steve guide him, or carry him.  Bucky wasn’t a cripple, and he sure as hell wasn’t a dame.  The man who asked wasn’t from the 107th, or he would have already known why Sgt. Barnes couldn’t keep his feet.  Nor was he very observant, or he’d have noticed –

“I think he’s blind,” a lower voice murmured, French accent settling like sediment in a bottle of wine.  “You see, the way he does not look at us, or at his friend.  He listens.”

“Bastard _blinded_ him?” another man piped up, British and panting from where he must have hurried to join the conversation.  “Jaysus, I thought Zola just killed them.”

“Nobody blinded me,” Bucky snapped, exhausted and aching and expecting to twist his ankle with every step.  Someone in the group to his right squeaked with surprise, but the Frenchman only laughed.  “I’m blind.  You’re British.  I think I got dealt a better hand.”

Steve chuckled for next five hundred steps, happy enough to bite Bucky’s thumb when he reached out to feel Steve’s grin.  Bucky’s own smile felt foreign, sitting uneasily on his face where it hadn’t been welcome for months, not since the docks in New Jersey, the smell of diesel exhaust that had been his induction notice into the war.  He didn’t complain, this time, when Steve tugged him away from a tree stump and left his hand curled around Bucky’s arm; and Steve didn’t complain when Bucky’s fingers strayed out to map and remap the familiar lines of his face.

* * *

The first night back on base, Steve dragged Bucky to a tent that echoed with silence where the barracks’ tents burst with the pandemonium of too many men.  And a tent that smelled like – “Stevie, are you wearing _perfume_?”

“Oh, go jump in a lake,” Steve huffed.  “It’s normally the chorus girls’ tent, but I guess Phillips must have sent them home when he heard I’d quit.”

“You mean when he assumed you were dead?” Bucky amended, listening to Steve’s jacket collapse onto the thick canvas of a cot, the strange fabric of his uniform as he tugged it off his new chest.

“I wasn’t dead,” Steve grumbled, thudding onto the cot to work off his shoes.  That was true, but Bucky had spent weeks expecting night-blue pain to burn through his veins and leave him as cold as Mrs. Rogers in her casket, his hands forever stiffened in desperate fists.  And instead he was standing in a perfume and rouge-scented tent, Steve Rogers sitting less than a foot away, both of them alive.

He dove into Steve’s chest with enough force to knock the cot sideways and send them toppling gracelessly onto the ground, Steve grunting when his broad back hit the dirt.  Gasped when Bucky traced his breathing across his bare chest, used his mouth to trace the delicate skin under Steve’s eyes, the line where he needed to shave and the curve of his lips where his mouth had fallen open.

Steve tasted like days of sweat drying on smooth skin, like ash and smoke from a place that had nearly been Bucky’s tomb.  He tasted like freedom and safety bundled in one awkward kiss.

“Bucky,” Steve exhaled, meeting Bucky’s mouth with his own, running his new, enormous hands along the ridge of Bucky’s spine.  Bucky felt like a shaken bottle of champagne, frothing over, buzzing from his head to his fingertips.  “Wait,” Steve croaked, pulling his mouth away, though he kept his hands tight around Bucky’s hips.  “Wait.”

“Why?” Bucky demanded, pressing his pelvis down into Steve’s, grateful to Erskine for allowing him to line up their erections and their mouths in a way he couldn’t have if they had stayed in Brooklyn.  Almost grateful to Howard, because if they had stayed in Brooklyn Bucky would never have had the courage to try.

“Are you – I mean, Buck, is this just because now . . .”  Steve’s voice was strangely hesitant, his face turned away from Bucky, and the blush warm on his cheek.  “Because I’m different now?” he finally finished, sounding as small as a mouse skittering through the walls.

Bucky raised his eyebrows, waiting for the rest of the joke, but Steve didn’t say anything more.

“Punk, did Stark’s magic machine dump your brains out your ears?” he asked, climbing off Steve and folding his arms.  “I’m _blind_.”

“Yeah,” Steve agreed, but his voice was thin as a thread, fraying with uncertainty.  “But you were –” Steve swallowed, and Bucky could practically hear him blush. “- touching my chest.  And I know that Erskine’s serum –”

“Christ on a cracker,” Bucky swore, and shoved Steve onto a cot that they hadn’t knocked over.  He put his hand back on Steve’s chest, brushed a thumb over the peak of Steve’s nipple to hear the shivery breath that Steve took.  He curled his other hand around Steve’s cheek, rubbing his thumb over lips still damp from their kiss.

“Your heart beats different,” he concurred, “but right now you’re breathing like you’re bound for an asthma attack.  You still smile here,” and he pressed the corner of Steve’s mouth, “and frown here,” stretching an index finger to smooth away the line between Steve’s brows.  “And you still sound like chocolate, and talk like the waves dragging the sand back out to sea.”  Bucky turned his head, afraid that Steve could read his face with his eyes the way Bucky read Steve’s with his hands.  He shrugged, and cleared his throat.  “Maybe you look like Clark Gable, now, but I see the same two-bit punk I’ve loved since ’39.”

“Bucky,” Steve murmured, new, callused hands dragging Bucky down into a kiss.  “Bucky, god, it’s you.  It was only ever going to be you.”  Then he pulled them both onto the narrow cot, and there were better things to do than talk.

* * *

“Don’t you ever wish you could see?” Jim asked, his words coalescing into a cold mist near Bucky’s ear, out of breath because the damn Europeans couldn’t build their trains at the _bottom_ of the mountains.

“Why?” Bucky huffed, cursing the knee-high drifts of snow.  “You want me to swoon at your pretty face, Morita?”

“Ain’t _my_ pretty face you’re after,” Morita riposted, and didn’t say anything when Bucky ducked under a tree branch that he shouldn’t have known was there.  It worried Bucky, sometimes, how much louder the landscape seemed to be now, since Azzano.  He didn’t trip over furrows in the ground, anymore, or skin his forehead running into trees.  “But c’mon, Sarge, you must want to see something.  A sunset?  Lena Horne?  Captain America without his suit?”

“I heard that!” Steve shouted, probably already at the top of the mountain.  “Are you imagining me naked, Jim?”

“You’re not bad, Cap, but you’re a bit thick in the thighs for me,” Morita hollered back, and the team’s laughter echoed over the snow.

“Do you ever wish you could reach inside someone and know what they’re feeling?  Touch something and know where it’s been, feel its whole history through your palms?”  Bucky kept his voice quiet, because they were marching toward a fight, and the Commandos only enjoyed philosophy over a bottle of Hydra’s whiskey at the end of a bloody day.

“No,” Morita replied, his fingernails scratching at hair that Steve said looked like an oil slick.  “No, I haven’t.  It just sounds strange, to be honest.  Feeling the whole world inside and out, start to finish.”

“Yeah,” Bucky said, and swerved around a stunted, snow-laden tree.  “You sense the world the way you do, and you wouldn’t change it.  So why should I?”

“That’s pretty deep, Sarge,” Morita teased, but his voice was subdued.  “Guess you’re right.  Did always wish I could fly, though.  Might not change how I sense the world, but Superman gets all the dames.”

“We’re pretty high up,” Bucky offered, banging his shin on a boulder he refused to admit he’d somehow known was there.  “If you wanted to try leaping the mountain in a single bound.”

“Can you sense what I’m feeling, Sarge?  I’ll give you a hint – it’s all balled up in my fist, right here,” and five minutes later Jim was cursing through a mouthful of snow while Steve threatened to toss them _both_ off the mountain if they didn’t get their asses up to the cable with the rest of the team.

If wishes were horses, Mrs. Rogers had always told them, (blotting away the blood under their noses, wrapping their torn knuckles and swollen hands,) then beggars would ride.

Bucky had never wished for anything as a boy, besides that Indiana was next to Queens.  He had saved up years of wishing, hoarded it without knowing that it would all go into one desperate plea, Steve’s scream still ringing in his ears.

Bucky wished he could fly.  But wishing didn’t stop the fall.

* * *

A new mission.  Agents brought him the target’s voice, their scent, the sound of their footsteps when they walked – and when they started to run.  The Soldier listened to the voice, and tilted his head.  There was something in this newest voice, something that tasted of cocoa and sea salt.  Something in the man’s footsteps that straightened the Soldier’s spine, made him twist toward the sound, ready to follow.

Eager, they said, and let him go.

So he went, out of the chamber and into the sun.  The sun was yellow.  Yellow felt like the silk of a chemise, only divided into rays, into strands of hair.  The target had yellow hair, the Soldier knew, and blue eyes.

He tried not to know it, though.  No one ever debriefed the Soldier in colors.  In hair length, yes, in gestures and stutters and the other, minute ways he could identify a target.  And if no one had told him that the target had eyes like the thick, soft yarn of a sweater, then how did he know?

The woman was more of a challenge.  Both men breathed loudly, grunted when they ran and hit the pavement with heavy thuds.  The woman _stopped_.  She stopped moving, stopped breathing; she made no sound at all, and she stayed behind something so that the Soldier couldn’t sense her form.

Someone had trained her.

When her legs wrapped around his neck and the Soldier inhaled leather and sweat through his mask, he realized it had been him.  He knew this woman, though he was not meant to know anything at all.  He knew the power running through her small hands, and how it felt to brush out her long hair.

Red, she had told him, in a past he was _not supposed to have_ , and he had thought of tomatoes, and curly hair and a voice like waves lapping against the wood of a pier.

But the woman was nothing compared to the man – the target.  The man did not telegraph his assaults, but the Soldier could predict each move he would make.  His body fell into a rhythm that his trainers had not taught him, the same way his hand had curled around the shield and nearly refused to let go.

The man smelled like harsh washing powder and a dusty city in a summer drought, like the leather of a baseball and the metallic taste running through his sweat and his blood.  His heartbeat hammered through the Soldier’s admantine palm, and there was something there, something familiar in the rapid pulse fluttering – _not_ fluttering, that was important, though he couldn’t say why – under his hand.

Then the man knocked away the Soldier’s mask, and stopped fighting.  “Bucky?” his target exhaled, the word thrown like a cry after taking a metal fist to the gut.  And in countless, limitless missions, the Soldier had never stepped forward to lift his hand to the target’s face.

In all those missions, he had never needed so badly to see the line between someone’s brows, of the edges of their mouth.

Then Hydra showed up, and tore the Soldier away before he could glimpse the target with more than the barest brush of his thumb against the corner of chapped, gaping lips.

* * *

_Steve_.  The scent of gunpowder on his fingers.  The slice of a shield cutting through air, the wrenching of metal from the side of a train, the crumpling steel of a helicarrier.  The sound of a voice damp with tears, begging for Bucky’s return.

The weightless, dizzying hopelessness of a fall.  Memories slammed into the Soldier nearly as hard as he slammed into the river, gasping for the breath he had lost before diving below the surface.

Water made it harder to sense movement.  There was no way for him to know where Steve was, unless he started flailing.  The Soldier fought down an irrational stab of panic from under his ribcage, and held still.  There.  Bubbles.  He ignored the pain in his shoulder to swim deeper, scooping up the limp body below him and dragging it to shore.

He’d intended to leave, as soon as he’d made sure that Captain America was still breathing.  Even without a body, Hydra and SHIELD would assume the Soldier had died when the helicarrier exploded.  He didn’t need eyes to see the decades of evil he had done.  He didn’t think he could bear to stay and hear the indictment in Steve’s voice, once he was informed of all Bucky’s crimes.

So he should have left, before anyone else came for their Captain, before Steve regained consciousness and realized that he was there.  But pressing his fingertips to Steve’s neck called up a weak, familiar heartbeat, printed into Bucky’s skin deeper than the fingerprints they’d burned away.

But now Steve’s pulse was weak from the loss of blood, and Bucky couldn’t hear anyone near enough to save Captain America before he bled out in the mud.  He would have heard the helicopter, minutes later, but his face was pressed to the clammy skin of Steve’s cheek, using his lips to trace the line of Steve’s nose, the indent above his upper lip.

He heard the shouting, though, and had enough time to vanish before the Falcon could land.

* * *

Of course, that didn’t explain his decision to walk into the hospital late that night, still smelling faintly of river water and gunpowder.  He had changed clothes.  It had taken hours crouched near the promenade, until he’d identified a man of about his height and weight, though heavier on his feet.  It had taken less time to follow the man home and incapacitate him long enough to acquire a handful of clothes and a pair of sunglasses.

The Commandos had bought Bucky his first pair.  “We know you don’t need ‘em, Sarge,” Monty had said, while Jones snuck up behind him and jammed them onto his nose.  “But it’s scaring away the dames, the way you stare through ‘em instead of at their tits.”

“I don’t stare at their tits either!” Steve had protested, the blush flooding through his voice.

“Well, yeah, Cap,” Morita agreed, “but you’ve never gotten near enough for a dame to notice.”

Sunglasses, like the goggles Hydra had fitted onto him, prevented people from staring at Bucky’s eyes, their gazes like a beetle crawling over his skin.  Though his targets had probably never spent time wondering about the Soldier’s eyes.

His knives were sharp enough to cut his hair and scrape the stubble from his cheeks.  Steve had shaved him, when he’d first sprouted hair on his chin and Mrs. Rogers had taught them to sharpen a razor and lather their faces.  “You’ll slit your throat,” he’d huffed, and Mrs. Rogers had snorted but held her tongue.  He’d still done it, sometimes, during the war, even though it was plenty clear by then that Bucky could handle a blade well enough to only slit the throats he aimed to cut.

Then he’d walked into the city, planning to find a bus and head somewhere no one would look, and instead found himself asking a tired nurse for the way to Steven Rogers’ room.  “I thought I’d memorized the route,” he lied easily, removing his sunglasses and rubbing the bridge of his nose to draw her gaze, “but I left to find the restroom, and it turns out these halls all seem the same when you’re blind.”

Her voice was padded with sympathy, and she kept one hand on his arm as she led him to Steve’s room.  They coddled the blind, now, with their musical crosswalks and specially made canes.  When Bucky was little, Mrs. MacMillan had spit on him and told him not to go near her _healthy_ boys, and Mr. Kramer had told Becky that their father should’ve drowned him in the river, and none of the men with him on the street corner had disagreed.

There were cords running from Steve’s body to a hundred different machines, humming with electricity or filled with fluids. Needles in Steve’s arm, catheters running from under the blanket to plastic bags at the end of the bed, a tube in his mouth that ran to an electric bellows, puffing air into Steve’s lungs.  A clothespin on his finger, running to a box that beeped in a rhythm timed to Steve’s pulse.

Nobody bothered him until late the next morning.  The nurses moved quietly in and out on their rubber-soled shoes, but they kept to the edges of the room except when they removed the bellows, and none of them said a word to the man rubbing his fingers in small circles over the muscles in Steve’s arm, reacquainting himself with the hair that curled over his forearm, the vein tucked into the soft crease of his elbow.

“I’d ask if you were here to kill Steve,” a voice drawled from the doorway, dry as the Sahara at midday, “but the nurses say that you’ve been here for hours, and I didn’t take you for the inefficient type of assassin.”  Words redolent with sarcasm, but in a voice like milk with chocolate syrup, suited to a counselor’s job.  The Falcon, leaning against the doorframe with his arms folded, calmer than he should have been upon finding the Soldier.  “On the other hand,” the man continued, undeterred by Bucky’s silence, “the nurses also say you’re blind.  A pair of ray-bans and every man’s suddenly Ray Charles.”  The Falcon scoffed, and moved into the room.  Slowly.  “Though whoever cut your hair _must_ have been blind, man, because that looks like it went through a blender.”

Bucky wasn’t certain what words the Falcon was using, but he’d heard Dernier speak that way to a dog they’d found in Poland, quiet French chatter as he edged near the terrified mutt, trying to hide an undercurrent of fear.  Terrified or not, a dog had teeth, and the Falcon had been bitten once already.

“So Barnes – you do know you’re Barnes, I assume, or you wouldn’t be sitting here in a god-awful pink polo and purple pants, holding Steve’s hand.”  Pink.  Bucky ran the shirt hem over his metal thumb.  Mrs. Rogers had said pink was springtime, and purple was the fall.  Bucky should have been dressed like the night, like the winter days without any sun.  The Falcon coughed, or maybe he laughed.  Bucky hadn’t heard anyone laugh for a very long time.  “I’ll hand it to you, Barnes, for a brainwashed assassin you’re still a pretty good actor.  Between the hair, the glasses, and the outfit, I can see how you convinced them you’re blind.”

“He _is_ blind,” a voice between them croaked, hoarse from the dry air in the hospital and ragged from the tube that had abraded his throat.  Bucky let the Falcon fetch the water; he had no plans to release Steve’s hand, until Steve shook him away for all that he’d done.  The crunch of ice and a few loud swallows, and the air eddied around Steve’s free hand when he waved the Falcon back.  “He always has been, Sam.”

The Falcon’s chuckle was unamused, a sound of irritation surrounded by disbelief.  “I know you hit your head pretty hard, Rogers,” he bit out, refolding his arms defensively over his chest.  “But this guy shot Fury up from a different building.  He shot you!”

Steve pulled his hand away and Bucky’s chest tightened, preparing for the blow, but it was only to reach down and intertwine his fingers through the plates that made Bucky’s left hand.  “Figured you’d want your hand free,” Steve whispered, his gaze warm like a summer day in Lehigh.  “You haven’t seen me in a while.”  ‘A while’ whistled with the sweep of icy air down a mountain, the harsh sound of a train’s horn echoing louder than the screams of two men.

“Aha!” the Falcon erupted, interrupting Bucky’s hesitant move to press his fingers to Steve’s swollen face.  “He’s not blind, if he can see you!”

Steve’s eyes widened and his eyebrows lifted; he had rolled his eyes at his new friend.  Bucky exhaled abruptly, snorting like Mrs. Rogers always did when she didn’t want to laugh, and the cut on Steve’s lip stretched with his smile.

“He doesn’t see with his eyes,” Steve explained patiently, and only Bucky had known him long enough to hear the strain his tone always took when he had to remind people that there was nothing wrong with Bucky’s hearing, and being blind didn’t mean needing Steve to speak for him.  Bucky found the dent between Steve’s brows, and his lips quirked when it smoothed away under his touch.  “But he sees a lot more than the rest of us.”

The Falcon still vibrated with skepticism, so Bucky pulled his hand from Steve’s face to tug off the sunglasses and turn his face to where the other man kept flaring his nostrils when he breathed.

“God Bucky,” Steve said, sounding like a glass shattered on the ground, destroyed beyond repair.  “I could never get the blue right, for your eyes.  I tried so many times, after they brought me back, but it was always wrong.”  Steve lifted his left hand to smooth over Bucky’s forehead, soft as down across his temples, fingers pressed for a moment against his lids.  Sometimes Steve needed to see things with his hands, Bucky knew, because apparently you couldn’t always believe your eyes.

“Okay, okay,” the Falcon surrendered, raising his hands.  “That creepy stare –” The pillow rustled as Steve swung his head around to glare at the man to his left. “- All right, _sorry_ , that weird way you’re not looking at me is pretty damn convincing.”  Steve grumbled, displeased, but quieted when Bucky returned to mapping the spongy bruising around his eyes, the harsh imprint of a metal fist left in his cheek.

“It doesn’t make sense, though,” the Falcon added, sounding less incredulous and more genuinely confused, the babble of tourists heading downtown on an uptown train.  “You said that he must have gotten some sort of serum, like yours, for him to survive this whole time.”

‘Survive’ tasted like the rubber bit in his mouth, felt like liquid ice freezing his veins and blood congealing on his hands.  Steve murmured agreement, and the moist warmth of his breath on Bucky’s palm pulled him back from the memories of the cold.

“But the serum you got cured your – well, your whole dictionary of medical woes.  So shouldn’t the off-brand serum have cured Barnes’s blindness?”

Steve laughed, harder than he should have, reopening the cut on his lip and probably tearing at the stitches holding his chest together.  He laughed until his lashes were wet and he was gasping for breath, and the sound of it lodged in Bucky’s throat.  Steve laughed like the sound of a crowd when the bat cracked out a home run, the burst of water from a fire hydrant on a scorching August day.

“All right, Rogers,” the Falcon said, once Steve’s laughter had subsided to a soft chuckle.  Both men pretended not to notice the cool weight of the tears that Steve wiped from Bucky’s cheeks.  “Care to tell me why that idea was so damn hilarious?”

“I thought Dr. Erskine was a godsend,” Steve admitted, squeezing Bucky’s admantium hand.  “Inventing a serum that might make me the ‘perfect man.’  I wanted it to cure my asthma and my problems hearing, my crooked back and, well, everything else that made up Steven Grant Rogers and made him no good for the war.”

He paused, and if Bucky curled his fingers into his palm he could almost remember the tap-tap-flutter of a fragile heart, and the bumps along a curved spine.

“Yes,” the Falcon prompted, drawing out the word in a hiss between his front teeth.  “I’m still not seeing the punchline, here.”

“I thought the perfect man would be perfect for the war.  The perfect soldier.  And here I am,” he added, sweeping a hand down to indicate the length of muscle and bone.  “But Bucky never wanted to be a soldier,” Steve told him, and Bucky pressed his lips to Steve’s hand, then bit down on his thumb to distract him from the sorrow curdling his words.  “He never wanted to change anyone – not me,” Steve’s love poured like sugar into the words, “and not himself.”

Bucky could hear the man’s eyebrows encroach on his hairline.  “You’re telling me that Barnes’s perfect man was _blind_?” he replied, choking out the last word.

Steve smiled with the corners of his mouth, and bit Bucky’s thumb where he’d pressed it to the cut on Steve’s lip, then angled his head up.  Steve had never been quiet with his demands, and the sound of his hair against the starched cotton of the pillowcase was the impatient insistence on a kiss.  “Why not?” he answered the Falcon, grinning when Bucky acquiesced and leaned in, inhaling hospital antiseptic and Steve’s stale sweat.  “Mine is.”

Steve’s lips tasted like coppery blood and sterile, ammonia air.  But beneath that Steve still tasted like freedom, and a soft landing after a long fall.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[podfic] Among the Lilies](https://archiveofourown.org/works/11350371) by [annapods](https://archiveofourown.org/users/annapods/pseuds/annapods)




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